New altitude record on a car

This is way to funny not to write about it. On March, Chrysler sponsored a crew of 20 people, 7 Jeep Wrangler Unlimited 2007 and half a million euro budget to achieve the altitude record on a car at Ojos del Salado, Chile. The german team achieved 21,804 feet on their factory stock Wranglers and installed a “Jeep Parking Only: All others don´t make it up here anyways”. Last weekend a two man army on a modded Suzuki Samurai SJ-413 1987 broke the record, achieveing 21,942 feet. But the hillarious part is they found the Jeep sign on the floor so they cut the “All other don´t make it up here anyways” and took it home as a souvenir. I´m sure the guys at Chrysler are way too pissed about their PR stunt being broke just a month later with a 5 thousand dollar budget

What I´ve been up to

I´ve been quite busy. When I re-started this blog I didn´t even imagine how busy things would go. I´m finishing a review, just a few editions and it should go fine. I also have to start and finish in record time a review on the GeForce 8800GTS 320MB. The new GeForce cards arrived. This the GeForce 8500GT, 8600GT and 8600GTS, courtesy of MSI. They are already being benched by one of our moderators who now is one of our new reviewers.

In between I´ve been searching for air tickets to Taipei, for Computex. Yes I will go to Computex even thought I thought I wouldn´t. This time I´ll fly through New Zeland, Australia, Hong Kong and finally Taiwan, 32 hours of love. At least I´ll get enough milleage to complete my account and get two free two tickets, one of them is of course CES Las Vegas.

Avianca will fly the 787-8 Dreamliner

One of my big hobbies is civil aviation, I´m one of those strange people who don´t only like travelling but also like airports and airplanes. I´ve been following the Boeing 787-8 Dreamliner development since a while, this will be one of the new composite made civil airliners and the next generation mid capacity family from Boeing. The 787 will come in three flavors, 787-3, 787-8 and 787-9, being the 787-8 the first one to be on service during 2008. This last one can carry up to 223 people in three classes and has better autonomy of than the -3 variant due to it´s larger wingspan and winglets.

Avianca just announced that will be the first southamerican airline to fly the 787-8 during the 2010. Unfortunately American Airlines and LAN – my airlines of preference to and from the United States – are not in the order list, and SCL-MIA/SCL-DFW is not a high demand route, it means I´ll have to continue flying on the old 767-300 (763) for a while.

Painting USA

If found this practical webpage at Shawn´s blog, it paints in red the states you´ve visited within the USA. For me it´s just 9 states, not bad considering I live at least 4 thousand miles away from this country. Two of them I just knew the airport, this is Illinois and Missouri (Chicago and St. Louis), the rest I´ve been at least a day, or a night, like in the case of New York, for New Years Eve. What about you?

Buenos Aires 05.04.07-07.04.07

I arrived today from Buenos Aires, and just waked up from my nap. As always with this type of trips, I´m really exhausted. It´s always the same: taking pictures, PR, going out for dinner and preparing content. The trip was very productive on the business side, but not so much on the resting side. The only chance I had of taking some pictures was from a taxicab. I hope you like them

Travelling: 2007

This year I won´t travel as much as I did during 2006. This means that I won´t be able to go to Computex. I will send one of our editors for sure, Computex is the world cup of computer hardware. The problem is I really want to finish school, and during that week, I have my finals.

So basicly from here to June is just Argentina. I´m planning to go somewhere with my friends during winter vacations, that´s July down here, maybe Brazil, Peru or even Mexico. If that doesn´t work, I´m studying in making a Taiwan & China tour to meet some manufacturers and check out the latest trends. This all depends if I have something to do in Asia and they don´t throw all their chips in Computex (which they might).

In September – we have a one week vacation – I plan to go to IDF San Francisco. I hope Intel invites me, if not, I´ll just use my milleage. In fact I already have ticket reservations for September, I´m really thinking in confirming them. If finally Intel decides to pay the trip, I´ll just move the ticket towards January 2008 with a U$100 fee. During January I plan to go to CES at Las Vegas and MacWorld San Francisco, in fact I´m really thinking in renting a nice car and drive from Vegas to SF. But that doesn´t count because it is 2008.

As you can see I won´t travel as much as during 2006, this means I´ll probably loose my elite status at One World, which sucks, but at least I´ll finish school fast enough and have enough time for my international ramblings.

Santiago 101

As I promised, I´ll be posting some pictures of Chile. I´ll start with Santiago, Chile´s capital city and where I live. I took this photos today while driving to and from school, this is not really Santiago´s typical pictures, but more the places I see day to day. Keep in mind Santiago is a huge city, one of the largest in South America. Santiago, has it´s own World Trade Center, which is part of the financial district of the city, called informaly Sanhattan. Sanhattan has a couple of big buildings, and two more are being constructed right now. One of them will be the biggest one in Chile. According to Wikipedia, this is downtown, according to Chileans, downtown is far down from this area, at least 3 or 4 kilometers. Just a walk away, 15 blocks or less, you can find Pedro de Valdivia. Pedro de Valdivia is a rather old street, where you can still find stone streets and big trees, is definitely worth a walk if you are around. In Pedro de Valdivia you can also find some budget hotels, although in it´s best times, it was a street for rich people, that is why you can see some really nice old houses. Nowadays those buildings are used as offices or even embassys. Even though stone roads are a bit romantic, you can have a bad time during rain, unless you drive like Colin McRae, which I do (lol!). In the picture at the left you can find one of our newest public buses, they carry fancy led signs and are white (they used to be yellow). People say the new transportation system sucks, it seems they changed 7 thousand buses for 5 thousand new ones, I wonder why it sucks…

Coming back home, I was harrased by a group of traditional journalists, it seemed they wanted to kidnap me. Is not an easy task being part of the indie media and part time blogger in Chile. I managed to escape, but I´m sure they will try this again

Breakfast of Champions

Last year after Intel´s Editors Day, at Salta, Argentina, we where supposed to have a last night at Buenos Aires where we had plans for some bar hopping. Unfortunately our flight from Salta to Buenos Aires was delayed, and we had no time for nightlife nor going to the hotel, so we had to be in transit for 6 hours at Ezeiza waiting for our flight back to Chile.

This is when we had the Breakfast of Champions at the Duty Free shop: Vodka shots at 6 AM. I´m the director and camera guy. Check out the lady screaming, “No!” at the end of the video

MaximoLAN 2007

MaximoLAN is one, or maybe the best LANParty in Argentina. It´s co-organized by MaximoPC, a hardware review site based in our neighbor country. The location for this year´s edition is still to be decided, but the dates are ready, 5, 6 and 7th of April. I´m looking forward to attend this event, not only because I want to frag – which I do – but mostly because it´s a great opportunity to keep up with some PR contacts, that will fly there to show off their newest products.

The best part is that those days are holidays, so I´m still deciding if I´ll stay one or two days after the event. Buenos Aires is always fun, it´s cheap, they have great clubs and restaurants. I´m really looking forward for this event.

Why I chose OneWorld

When you travel a lot, or you plan to travel a lot, mileage is a big deal. Mileage will get you benefits like shorter queue line at the counters, free upgrades, better seats and eventually free tickets. Nowadays there are three big airline alliances, OneWorld, SkyTeam and Star Alliance, being the last one the biggest one.

I chose OneWorld for several reasons, the first one is that American Airlines´ AAdvantage, is the best frequent flyer program in the world, for just three or four tickets in coach I can get one free and they also give you plenty of upgrade tickets (4 or 5 for each 10k miles). Eventhough I don´t really like AA for it´s service, with LAN, another OneWorld airline, they have the best fares from Chile to North America. I can fly to Miami or Dallas, for as low as U$1000, and the best part is, that with AA they almost always just give you the domestic flights for free. It´s not free-free, but a ticket to Miami is U$1000, and a ticket to San Francisco via Miami is just U$1100, if you add two stopovers it will be U$1200 or so.

The second big reason is LAN is part of OneWorld, LAN is a chilean based airline, which I think is the one of the best airlines in the world. They pretty much control all the traffic in southamerica, so when I have to travel short filghts, I use LAN and when I have to go to the United States, I can use AA or even LAN combined with AA for the same fare.

The third reason and probably the most important, is that I can fly to Asia in the shortest time possible. I can use LAN to travel up to Australia with connection in New Zealand, and afterwards use Qantas or Cathay Pacific to get to Asia. If I used SkyTeam or Star Alliance, I would have only two options, make a connection in the UInited States – which would make my flight 10 hours longer – or go the other way around with Air France to Paris and afterwards Hong Kong. I must admit Air France is my favorite airline, but I always prefer a cheap, short crappy flight, than a long, expensive, nice flight.